As the giveaway progresses, qualified entries show up on a list. I had to wait about an hour between list updates. That means you'll need to wait for at least an hour after your contest ends before choosing a winner to make sure that everyone has shown up on the list.

According to Twiveaway, 141 people entered, most of which were new Twitter followers. That's good, since that's 100+ more people that will see my Twitterfeed links to new BlogCoach.org articles and BabyCheapskate articles and 100+ more Twitter followers to interact with and get feedback from. {Hi new BlogCoach readers!} BlogCoach's readership isn't huge, and I feel like the giveaway got more entries because I ran the giveaway on Twitter.

Ending the giveaway was easy. I clicked "edit campaign" and then clicked "choose winner." The service automatically disabled the giveaway, chose a random winner and then popped up a screen where I could type the Direct Message that would let the winner know she won (Congrats, Christina!).

Will I use Twiveaway again? Sure. Once you know how the site works (read the .pdf or watch the video tutorial), it's easier to administer a giveaway on Twitter than on a blog, since you won't have to weed out duplicate entries, entries that don't meet the requirements, or entries that don't give enough contact information. Choosing and notifying a winner is completely painless. I consider the gain in Twitter followers as valuable to my readership as a gain in RSS subscribers.

For this giveaway, I had followers retweet a tweet that sent folks to BlogCoach to find out about the giveaway. I'm wondering how much more viral the giveaway would have been if I had run the giveaway completely on Twitter, using a tweet like this:

Follow @BabyCheapskate and RT this tweet to enter a giveaway for $25 Amazon gift cert. Enter by Sun at midnight.

In my experience, giveaways always get the best results when you require readers (or Twitterers) to perform as few actions as possible. I'm so curious, that I just might run a giveaway like this one next week!

Besides the lag in list updating, the only other negative about Twiveaway that I can think of is that all the RTs showed up on my @BabyCheapskate reply page and made it hard to see non giveaway-related replies and comments.

Let me know what you thought of the Twiveaway giveaway, and whether you think Twiveaway is a tool you'd like to use.

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